New Epic Ghostcrawler Blog Explains 4.2 Class Changes

In what is probably one of the best and most in-depth Blizzard blogs yet, Ghostcrawler takes the time to discuss the class balancing changes that have been made in Patch 4.2, giving specific examples of changes that were made, and why they were made. This new blog provides an interesting look into the development process (as Ghostcrawler's blogs always do) and will definitely answer some players' questions regarding Blizzard's justification of specific changes being made.

Ghostcrawler

We understand that raw patch notes don’t always provide enough context for changes to the game, so we thought we’d take a moment to explain some of our logic behind the buffs and nerfs coming in the 4.2 "Rage of the Firelands" patch. We particularly want to try to combat the perception that classes end up nerfed in PvE as collateral damage from PvP nerfs (or vice versa). The number of PvP buffs versus PvP nerfs were about equal this time around, and we make careful consideration to keep the impact outside of PvP minimal. So, if we nerfed your class’s PvE damage, it’s most likely because we thought your class was doing too much damage in PvE.

No doubt you’ll disagree with some of our logic -- “But we were middle of the pack!” seems to be the common rebuttal these days. Balance is an art, though, not a science. (This topic probably deserves its own blog, but I’ll try to spell it out briefly.)

Balancing a BattleshipPlayer feedback certainly plays a role in our deciding to make balance changes, but it’s just one small part. (And remember that our public forums are not the only place where players voice their opinions.) We also do a lot of internal testing, both simulations and actual character performance, and we collect a lot of external data, which needs to include players at a wide variety of skill levels.

If a class is performing poorly except in the hands of one percent of the population, that’s a problem, but it’s not an excuse for that class to be overpowered when played by that one percent, especially in PvP. In PvP, your group composition (whether your whole Arena team or just the participants in a given fight in a Battleground) matters enormously. In PvE, the encounter specifics matter enormously (and we’re about to get a new cast of characters in Firelands). As a result, it can be challenging to decide which numbers are the em numbers. It doesn’t make sense to balance PvE damage solely around Patchwerk-style target dummies and assume everything else is a gimmick. Likewise it doesn’t make sense to buff and nerf for each individual encounter. (Say a boss buffs casters -- do you then nerf casters as a consequence?)

Also realize that we don’t believe in the existence of any single thermometer for estimating character performance. By that I mean there is no single relatively-accurate measurement of real and true DPS (or tanking, or healing) upon which most players agree. Everything from simulations to target dummy DPS to Arena comp percentages to the top 100 raid parses all count as pieces of the puzzle, and you really have to consider the totality of all of that information in the proper context.

Resto druids "win" healing meters now in part because their raid cooldown, Tranquility, shows up as healing. Warriors do well on Chimaeron because they take a lot of raid damage. Resto shaman heal well on Chimaeron because everyone is wounded all the time.) Yet once you start eliminating data -- “oh that’s a gimmick fight” or “oh, someone is inflating their meters by attacking an irrelevant target” -- you risk skewing the results.

Statistics is a complex business. That doesn’t mean all of this stuff is inherently unknowable and nobody should bother. It just means you have to be careful; the discussions about these topics are never short and simple. It's wise to be skeptical when anyone attempts to boil down conclusions on class balance to very simple declarations.

Simple DeclarationsHaving said that, we have a lot of ground to cover below, so some of these notes are going to be very terse by necessity. My apologies in advance.

General

We changed the way interrupts interact with spell schools. Our intent when we created dual school spells (like Mind Spike being Frost and Shadow) was to allow players locked out of one school to still have something to cast, and we now have the technology to deliver on that design. However, we maintained the rule that being interrupted while casting a dual-school spell will lock you out of both schools because we didn’t want players to only use those spells as a way of avoiding interruption.

We changed all heals to have 200% crits because we wanted to make crit a more attractive stat to healers. Anything random is already at a disadvantage when viewed by a healer, and one point of haste just flat out increased throughput more than a point of crit.

We removed the threat caused by buffs or crowd control because we wanted to make communication and coordination easier in dungeons, especially among strangers using Dungeon Finder. We want the challenge of a dungeon encounter to be the encounter mechanics, not marking targets. We also think this change will be a quality of life improvement for tanks, who inherited a lot of the responsibility for explaining fights, marking targets and otherwise setting the pace.

We changed the values of Agility for plate-wearers and Strength for leather-wearers to reinforce which type of armor you should be using and so we wouldn’t have to spend diminishing returns trying to balance tanks wearing non-traditional armor sets.

We added the cast time to for PvP reasons. It is one of the most powerful forms of crowd control in the game, especially in Battlegrounds, and yet was impossible to prevent.

The nerfs to Obliterate and Howling Blast were made because Frost damage was too high in both PvP and PvE. Note that these values were hotfixed -- you shouldn’t see damage drop further when 4.2 goes live.

The Might of the Frozen Wastes change was a small tweak to help keep one-handed Frost relatively competitive with two-handed style.

The Unholy Might buff was to help catch Unholy up to Frost in PvE. Interestingly, we didn’t nerf Unholy damage at all in 4.1, but you can still see a small drop in their DPS because so many talented DKs went Frost. I’d love to have the discussion some time about how close two similar specs need to be before players will play the one that is most fun for them and not the one that does em higher damage. Is it 5%? 1%? 0%?

We boosted Feral damage to compensate for their losing the attack power from Strength. Net DPS shouldn’t change much overall, though burst may be slightly higher. (We didn’t want to buff bleeds since that was a problem before in PvP.)

We cut back on the power of s from Feral and Balance druids because we felt they were contributing to too much healer mana.

We changed several Balance druid mechanics to cut down on the damage they could do while moving in both PvP and PvE and to cut back on some of their strength in multi-dot fights in PvE. Furthermore, we felt like druids were spending too much time at one end or the other of the Eclipse bar by using dots rather than moving the bar back and forth as intended.

We toned down bear damage, because they were going to do more DPS than other tanks while tanking. Other changes were made to keep bears from neglecting certain core abilities.

We redesigned Restoration's mastery because it was devalued in situations where druids did a lot of raid healing by HoT-ing different targets, especially in 25-player raids.

We nerfed Arcane Blast because Arcane’s damage was too high in PvE. We wanted Arcane to be competitive with Fire, especially given that Fire tends to perform better on fights with movement or multiple targets. However, it looked like many Fire mages were begrudgingly respeccing to Arcane, which wasn’t the intent. We wanted Arcane to be competitive, not the only serious mage spec for PvE. (See Frost vs. Unholy note above.)

We originally tried nerfing Spellsteal’s cooldown, but that made it feel really random (for both sides) since the mage had no control over which spell was stolen. We instead nerfed the mana cost to encourage tactical use of Spellsteal and discourage spamming. We’d still like to try a model where dispels have a long cooldown but remove everything, but that is too big a change for now.

We added the diminishing returns to Deep Freeze and (after earlier trying some different nerfs) to tone down Frost mage control, especially in the mid and lower tiers of PvP when dispels can’t be assured.

We buffed Word of Glory for three reasons: We felt Holy Power was mattering less to Holy paladins than it did at Cataclysm launch. We wanted to provide more uninterruptible healing in PvP. We knew Light of Dawn was trumping Word of Glory in almost all cases in 25-player raids.

We changed the mechanic to give Holy paladins slightly more offensive utility in PvP. We felt that ignoring the other healing classes came at some risk which was not the case for paladins.

We buffed Holy Radiance both to help PvE paladins feel like they could make larger contributions to raid healing (especially in light of the single-target nerfs) but also as part of a significant buff to Speed of Light to let Holy paladins have more mobility in PvP.

We made a tweak to Holy’s mastery to allow its bubble to stack, so it would be wasted less often when healing a single target.

We redesigned Sacred Shield, partially because paladin mitigation was going to be too good in the Firelands raid, but also because many paladins (though of course not all) told us they wanted a more dynamic rotation and less passive mitigation.

We buffed Seal of Righteousness to let Retribution use it for AE fights as intended, and also to buff Ret AE damage overall.

We made a slight buff to Selfless Healer. While we thought the old model was unbalanced and turned Ret into too much of a healing spec, we heard from a lot of players who liked the utility of being able to help heal somewhat. This talent should provide that trade-off in a more balanced way.

Shadow was doing too much DPS in PvE when multiple DoTs was favored, so we nerfed their DoT damage. We want Shadow to benefit from multi-DoTs, but Shadow’s damage was just too high under those conditions. We buffed Shadow cast-time spells to compensate.

We changed the facing requirement of Psychic Horror as a PvP quality of life change to make it consistent with other non-projectile crowd control spells.

We previously nerfed Water Shield via hotfix because shaman were gaining too much mana in PvP when attacked (especially by pets to discourage drinking). The 4.2 change is just a more elegant implementation of the same nerf that should keep the same mana per time as they have currently.

We recognized Fire Nova had some usability issues so we increased its throughput and added the Flame Shock refresh mechanic to help ease some of the inconvenience. This is a new mechanic and one we are still evaluating.

We introduced the Charred Glyph to help shaman feel less punished by movement in both PvP and PvE. The impact of changes like this is very difficult to model.

We nerfed for the same reason we nerfed -- it was just providing too much mana for the group’s healers as a whole. We didn’t want to decrease the benefit to the shaman, so we redesigned / added the talent of Resurgence to help offset the nerf to them personally.

We nerfed the Glyph of Havoc to reduce the ease of applying multiple DoTs in PvP.

We nerfed Drain Life because Affliction was forsaking Shadow Bolt in PvE, which wasn’t intended. We want Drain Life to be for utility, not primarily for damage, and we want all casters to have to hard cast at least some of the time. This was done via hotfix and players won’t see a change in 4.2.

We put and Recklessness on the same cooldown to reduce warrior burst in PvP.

We also nerfed Arms and Fury damage across the board because they were doing too much damage in both PvP and PvE. While we are sensitive to casters outperforming melee on several raid encounters, having warriors handily outperform all other melee isn’t the solution to that problem.

The stance requirement changes on long cooldowns was a quality of life change.

We didn’t want warriors using Charge as a rotational ability on some fights without actually having to move (which was a bug created as a result of a fix put in to help hunter problems with minimum range).

Raid Nerfs

As discussed previously, now that players who have spent a lot of time in Throne of the Four Winds, Blackwing Descent, and Bastion of Twilight are moving on to Firelands, we wanted to make sure players who previously couldn’t progress on those raids are now able to experience them. In a way, this provides new content for everyone -- if you’re done with the 4.0 raids, you now have 4.2. If you haven’t seen the 4.0 raids yet, now’s your chance.

As I write this, 4.2 has not been completed, so there is still time for us to make additional changes. Constructive feedback is always welcome. Even the most articulate, logical, and passionate argument won’t always force our hand, but it helps.

--Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street is the lead systems designer for World of Warcraft. He successfully resisted the urge to bore the other designers with tales of obscure marine fauna for Vashj’ir, though he did suggest the pogonophorans.

Comment by Monday

Comment by Kanariya

So, because of PvP they decide to make Soul Swap and its glyph useless and talent people are going to drop?

Comment by Orranis

on 2011-06-16T21:29:02-05:00

We added the cast time to Hungering Cold for PvP reasons. It is one of the most powerful forms of crowd control in the game, especially in Battlegrounds, and yet was impossible to prevent.

And you did it in the complete wrong way. You made it just as powerful, but incredibly easy to prevent. Furthermore, having it prevented doesn't just mean you lose a Hungering Cold, it leaves you without a root/slow, ranged damage ability, and frost strike (?) when you'd probably need them most. I agree Blindstorm is incredibly powerful, but increase it's cooldown, or make it non-AoE. This combined with our mobility problems and huge survivability nerf is really laying it on thick to Death Knight's abilities to stay alive.

The nerfs to Obliterate and Howling Blast were made because Frost damage was too high in both PvP and PvE. Note that these values were hotfixed -- you shouldn’t see damage drop further when 4.2 goes live.

PvE? We were the third best melee spec, the two ahead of us both being warriors. Melee spec, that is. Literally every class that is not Shaman (two of the most horrible specs in game), Rogue (melee only), or Paladin (melee only) has a spec doing more damage than us, and all of those specs ranged.

The Glyph of Dark Succor change was to keep Death Strike from providing so much healing in PvP.

Again, the nerf was needed, but they're going about it the complete wrong way. Instead of reducing it's potency, they're making the glyph about as useful as Counterattack for hunters. Nerf the healing, or make some the additional healing a HoT, similar to Recoup, so that it's not so immediately powerful or spammable.

The Might of the Frozen Wastes change was a small tweak to help keep one-handed Frost relatively competitive with two-handed style.

Again, why not just buff ToT slightly? Why when things are tweaked so that we can have choice between two specs is the action to make both specs equally bad?

The Unholy Might buff was to help catch Unholy up to Frost in PvE. Interestingly, we didn’t nerf Unholy damage at all in 4.1, but you can still see a small drop in their DPS because so many talented DKs went Frost. I’d love to have the discussion some time about how close two similar specs need to be before players will play the one that is most fun for them and not the one that does em higher damage. Is it 5%? 1%? 0%?

Not lowest on the meters? I mean, you still do have some Unholy DK's floating around, but the only specs that Unholy actually beats is Subtlety and Frost Mage's it seems, both PvP oriented. I'd say it's a necessary buff, but I have scaling concerns, especially for PvP where the Necrotic Strike's will be simply ridiculous (for the whole 6 seconds of their duration after you get trained to 0% in less than a minute). I think one problem is that Unholy doesn't scale very well with weapon damage, and after this will scale insanely with strength.

And FFS he mentions QoL changes at least three times, can you please admit that playing Blood optimally at higher levels of content is a complete pain in the ass for an equal amount of mitigation, while still being the most likely tank to die because of extreme spikiness matched with the lowest effective health of all the tanks?

Comment by meene

on 2011-06-16T22:04:18-05:00

"However, it looked like many Fire mages were begrudgingly respeccing to Arcane, which wasn’t the intent. "

So, when Fire was king for five months, it was okay for Arcane mages to begrudgingly respec into Fire?

Comment by Backus

on 2011-06-16T22:13:19-05:00

None of these class explanations mean anything until they give some kind of response to ruining warsong gulch

Comment by jumbodog

on 2011-06-16T22:16:06-05:00

I agree that this was one of the best posts that GC has done in some time. People can and will disagree with where Blizzard is going on class X or ability Y. For example, as a Druid healer I dislike the new mastery Harmony; I much preferred symbiosis. But I appreciate the honesty of him saying that they are doing it to help 25 man raiders. At least it helps us understand why they are doing what they are doing and gives us some ability to judge whether or not their approach is successful.

Comment by Monday

on 2011-06-16T22:17:41-05:00

None of these class explanations mean anything until they give some kind of response to ruining warsong gulch

Because class balancing is totally the same as map creation.

Comment by Anvilwar

on 2011-06-16T22:28:27-05:00

the nerf to warriors has not yet been properly justified for me. but i do, however, totally love this:

The stance requirement changes on long cooldowns was a quality of life change.

Comment by Adrazel

on 2011-06-16T23:52:32-05:00

I’d love to have the discussion some time about how close two similar specs need to be before players will play the one that is most fun for them and not the one that does em higher damage. Is it 5%? 1%? 0%?

For the record, I still primarily play a Demonology Warlock, despite the fact that that spec does by far the least damage of the three. To me, it's far more entertaining than Afflic or Destro (although Destro is my offspec, and I do see a significant difference in my damage output, meters in use or not.)

Suffice it to say, I'm happy to see that locks aren't taking too big of a nerf beating this go around.

Comment by atomicwolf22

on 2011-06-17T04:33:44-05:00

I am very happy about the Ret aoe change and should help bring a little balance to AoE phases.

The Unholy Dk change was needed. And atleast they left Timmy along for once.

So with the blog post being up that means that we will see the patch come live this week (21 of June)?

Comment by Phannias

on 2011-06-17T05:26:26-05:00

As the truism states, "If you're explaining, you're losing". This is a very detailed blog by GC, but only because most of the changes coming out of Blizz recently with regards to class balance are puzzling to the point of impenetrability. Nerfs and buffs come and go with such worrying frequency and lack of care that it's practically a coin flip if the spec you've spent months or years playing is actually still going to be viable after each additional patch.

But it's nice to see how the few changes that were utterly self evident, such as nerfing arcane blast damage or reducing frost's control, require small paragraphs to explain them, whilst the changes that make the least sense, like the flat warrior damage nerf with no attempt at actually trying to fix the problem of high burst/low mobility, are dismissed as "Sure, casters are kicking your butt on damage output, but you were making other melee feel bad (whilst admitting frost DKs were putting out far too much damage and giving ferals yet more burst). This gimps you in both PvP and PvE, but we don't care". Don't forget to play to the peanut gallery now, will you GC?

Comment by OverZealous

on 2011-06-17T06:33:11-05:00

Informative, deep, and easy to understand. Well done

Comment by Orranis

on 2011-06-17T08:06:32-05:00

The Unholy Dk change was needed. And atleast they left Timmy along for once.

Timmy needs changes dude. First of all, make Gnaw cost no energy so you don't have to turn off auto-cast claw and then wait two seconds for him to pool energy to cast it. It has a cooldown, this would do nothing but make it work as intended in PvP.

Second of all, it needs to scale with crit. It's supposed to, and all other pets do, it just doesn't.

Third of all, I think they should fix the auto-cast Claw. I mean, currently any pro Unholy Death Knight has macro'd in into his Scourge Strike (and maybe Festering Strike if you're really pro), because otherwise it just doesn't cast as often as it should.

Fourth of all, Gargoyle needs to have a significantly less retarded AI. People talk about the Flame Elemental as stupid, but at least he's melee meleeing the wrong target. The Gargoyle is supposed to be a caster and it will melee the wrong target for like five damage a hit.

Comment by darth603

on 2011-06-17T08:10:48-05:00

As discussed previously, now that players who have spent a lot of time in Throne of the Four Winds, Blackwing Descent, and Bastion of Twilight are moving on to Firelands, we wanted to make sure players who previously couldn’t progress on those raids are now able to experience them. In a way, this provides new content for everyone -- if you’re done with the 4.0 raids, you now have 4.2. If you haven’t seen the 4.0 raids yet, now’s your chance.

I doubt it'll stop PUG organizers from requiring people to link their achievement, and blocking people who aren't part of huge raiding guilds from being able to enjoy raid content. That'd require achievements being made non-linkable, or at least raid completion ones.

Comment by Spectrezh

on 2011-06-17T10:54:28-05:00

Now this is how you should explain why you made the nerfs/buffs that you did for classes. Thorough. Hopefully this will stop people from QQ-ing as to why Blizzard changed the classes. You want to know the reason? Just read. I can't see how you can disagree with that good of an explanation :) Just like Ghostcrawler said, when they make these changes they don't just focus on the dps/healing of a tiny part of the players, they look at the whole spectrum.

Kudos to you Ghostcrawler!

Comment by Josfabriek

on 2011-06-17T11:49:18-05:00

Please ghostcrawler buff protection paladin in PVP. I bet there are a lot of people who like to do some protection PVP.Thank you

P.S. : Nice buffs on the balance druids, was necessary.

Comment by Alkony

on 2011-06-17T12:00:26-05:00

P.S. : Nice buffs on the balance druids, was necessary.

Say wha?

We changed several Balance druid mechanics to cut down on the damage they could do...

Plus the nerf to innervate is rather disheartening. What good does 1% mana every 2 seconds for 10 seconds do a caster low on mana? If they don't intend for druids to use it on other casters then just make it self cast only like Evocation.

Comment by Josfabriek

on 2011-06-17T12:33:34-05:00

I mean the 23% buff to wrath and starfire.

Comment by Astygia

on 2011-06-17T12:40:12-05:00

On the fence about most of the other ones, I can see that they're wanting some balance but most of changes seem a little pointless, or. Random? Not intending to sound hateful about it but it doesn't seem like many of these tweaks were things anyone was really concerned about.

Rogue-specific, having CloS share a cd with CR is just irritating though; unless I'm missing something there's just no longer a pressing reason to even use CR.

Comment by Interest

on 2011-06-17T13:06:06-05:00

We added the cast time to Hungering Cold for PvP reasons. It is one of the most powerful forms of crowd control in the game, especially in Battlegrounds, and yet was impossible to prevent.

Agreeable, but I feel there were other ways to weaken it without turning DKs into casters (reduced duration? Doesn't cause Frost Fever and all DoTs break it? Change the glyph so it doesn't cost 0 RP?)

The nerfs to Obliterate and Howling Blast were made because Frost damage was too high in both PvP and PvE. Note that these values were hotfixed -- you shouldn’t see damage drop further when 4.2 goes live.

Oblit does Frost damage?

The Glyph of Dark Succor change was to keep Death Strike from providing so much healing in PvP.

By turning it into a crapified Victory Rush. The self healing bonus just needed to be reduced, not completely remade. In fact, it doesn't even help DKs in Arenas and (high tier) PvE now, really. Actually, it's hardly helpful. In its current state every DK might as well erase it from their Glyph Book (unless they're leveling, maybe).

The Unholy Might buff was to help catch Unholy up to Frost in PvE. Interestingly, we didn’t nerf Unholy damage at all in 4.1, but you can still see a small drop in their DPS because so many talented DKs went Frost. I’d love to have the discussion some time about how close two similar specs need to be before players will play the one that is most fun for them and not the one that does em higher damage. Is it 5%? 1%? 0%?

I dunno. Doing a nerf and a buff might cause another gap. I have a bad feeling Frost will be left in the dust.

We boosted Feral damage to compensate for their losing the attack power from Strength. Net DPS shouldn’t change much overall, though burst may be slightly higher. (We didn’t want to buff bleeds since that was a problem before in PvP.)

Cats did not use strength. Why did you buff cat abilities? (I foresee abilities like Mangle hitting like a mack truck now)

We cut back on the power of Innervates from Feral and Balance druids because we felt they were contributing to too much healer mana.

Can't 100% argue with the Innervate nerf. There was another problem coming anyways (lolArcaneMages).

We changed several Balance druid mechanics to cut down on the damage they could do while moving in both PvP and PvE and to cut back on some of their strength in multi-dot fights in PvE. Furthermore, we felt like druids were spending too much time at one end or the other of the Eclipse bar by using dots rather than moving the bar back and forth as intended.

Really now?

We toned down bear damage, because they were going to do more DPS than other tanks while tanking. Other changes were made to keep bears from neglecting certain core abilities.

Won't argue with that.

We redesigned Restoration's mastery because it was devalued in situations where druids did a lot of raid healing by HoT-ing different targets, especially in 25-player raids.

I'm interested in the new Mastery...=D

Multi-Shot was doing too much damage in PvE given how simple it was to use.

No argument. Multi-Shot was hitting a bit too hard.

Careful Aim allowed Marskman hunters to do too much damage in PvE raiding, where the 80% health phase could last for a long stretch of time.

I'd honestly prefer a Careful Aim change (as in complete mechanics revamp). The way it was designed was a bit dodgy to begin with, to be honest.

However, the Careful Aim nerf also affected Survival, whose DPS was fine or even a little low, so we buffed Black Arrow to compensate.

Yes, but Black Arrow isn't exactly an amazing amount of damage for Survival. In fact, Black Arrow's damage is not, and was not, the main selling point of the shot. It was primarily Lock and Load procs that made it useful (and Explosive Trap does it better. A baseline ability > a 31 pointer?)

Also, as a general question: can Hunters be thrown a bone regarding PvP balance? We still remain the only class that cannot deal with damage well. We remain a class without a baseline self heal. Etc, etc. I'd love to see answers to this in future.

We nerfed Arcane Blast because Arcane’s damage was too high in PvE. We wanted Arcane to be competitive with Fire, especially given that Fire tends to perform better on fights with movement or multiple targets. However, it looked like many Fire mages were begrudgingly respeccing to Arcane, which wasn’t the intent. We wanted Arcane to be competitive, not the only serious mage spec for PvE. (See Frost vs. Unholy note above.)

Thank you. Glad I'm not the only one who thought that.

We originally tried nerfing Spellsteal’s cooldown, but that made it feel really random (for both sides) since the mage had no control over which spell was stolen. We instead nerfed the mana cost to encourage tactical use of Spellsteal and discourage spamming. We’d still like to try a model where dispels have a long cooldown but remove everything, but that is too big a change for now.

Whoa whoa whoa. That's the future of dispelling?

We added the diminishing returns to Deep Freeze and Ring of Frost (after earlier trying some different nerfs) to tone down Frost mage control, especially in the mid and lower tiers of PvP when dispels can’t be assured.

Understandable.

We buffed Word of Glory for three reasons: We felt Holy Power was mattering less to Holy paladins than it did at Cataclysm launch. We wanted to provide more uninterruptible healing in PvP. We knew Light of Dawn was trumping Word of Glory in almost all cases in 25-player raids.

LoD is pretty inferior in other cases, however.

We changed the Denounce mechanic to give Holy paladins slightly more offensive utility in PvP. We felt that ignoring the other healing classes came at some risk which was not the case for paladins.

I think the Denounce change is okayish. I will miss my instant Exorcisms.

We buffed Holy Radiance both to help PvE paladins feel like they could make larger contributions to raid healing (especially in light of the single-target nerfs) but also as part of a significant buff to Speed of Light to let Holy paladins have more mobility in PvP.

It needed a buff...hmm...

We made a tweak to Holy’s mastery to allow its bubble to stack, so it would be wasted less often when healing a single target.

It was a long time coming.

We made Selfless Healer, Divine Protection, and Beacon of Light no longer dispellable so that paladins didn’t lose so much of their survivability in PvP to dispels. (At no point in this patch was Avenging Wrath undispellable -- that was a myth.)

Well that's good (except maybe the Divine Protection part). It more or less makes sense.

Also, AW is still going to be dispellable!

We redesigned Holy Shield, partially because paladin mitigation was going to be too good in the Firelands raid, but also because many paladins (though of course not all) told us they wanted a more dynamic rotation and less passive mitigation.

So you brought back a castable HS. I'm happy =D.

We buffed Seal of Righteousness to let Retribution use it for AE fights as intended, and also to buff Ret AE damage overall.

And I'm happy about it.

We made a slight buff to Selfless Healer. While we thought the old model was unbalanced and turned Ret into too much of a healing spec, we heard from a lot of players who liked the utility of being able to help heal somewhat. This talent should provide that trade-off in a more balanced way.

The change is good. The longer WoG cooldown, I feel, was supposed to be targeted at the Prot spec. This helps to close that gap a bit.

Shadow was doing too much DPS in PvE when multiple DoTs was favored, so we nerfed their DoT damage. We want Shadow to benefit from multi-DoTs, but Shadow’s damage was just too high under those conditions. We buffed Shadow cast-time spells to compensate.

I don't disagree with this change, but care has to be taken to ensure the Mind Spike rotation isn't superior to the DoT rotation.

We changed the facing requirement of Psychic Horror as a PvP quality of life change to make it consistent with other non-projectile crowd control spells.

Which is good!

We nerfed Cloak of Shadows because it felt like rogues could counter both casters and melee specs too easily. This change forces them to choose between Cloak of Shadows and Combat Readiness.

I think this is a fair choice. I felt like I had too many ways to survive anyways =(.

However, we wanted to compensate rogues for this PvP nerf, and we concluded rogue damage in PvE was also too low, so we buffed their damage overall.

True more or less. Gotta be careful about scaling though.

The buff to Hemorrhage was designed to make it less punishing when it wasn’t possible to get behind a target, which often arises in PvP but also sometimes in PvE.

Which is good. Positional requirement attacks are kinda lame, by the way.

We previously nerfed Water Shield via hotfix because shaman were gaining too much mana in PvP when attacked (especially by pets to discourage drinking). The 4.2 change is just a more elegant implementation of the same nerf that should keep the same mana per time as they have currently.

We recognized Fire Nova had some usability issues so we increased its throughput and added the Flame Shock refresh mechanic to help ease some of the inconvenience. This is a new mechanic and one we are still evaluating.

I actually like the new Call of Flame mechanic. I'm going to be a happy Enhancement Shaman next patch.

We introduced the Glyph of Unleashed Lightning to help shaman feel less punished by movement in both PvP and PvE. The impact of changes like this is very difficult to model.

I think it's perfectly fine. Elemental Shamans needed mobility.

We nerfed Mana Tide Totem for the same reason we nerfed Innervate -- it was just providing too much mana for the group’s healers as a whole. We didn’t want to decrease the benefit to the shaman, so we redesigned / added the talent of Resurgence to help offset the nerf to them personally.

Mkay.

We nerfed the Glyph of Soul Swap to reduce the ease of applying multiple DoTs in PvP.

=(

We nerfed Drain Life because Affliction was forsaking Shadow Bolt in PvE, which wasn’t intended. We want Drain Life to be for utility, not primarily for damage, and we want all casters to have to hard cast at least some of the time. This was done via hotfix and players won’t see a change in 4.2.

Makes sense.

We put Deadly Calm and Recklessness on the same cooldown to reduce warrior burst in PvP.

Well the stance requirement change makes me somewhat happy.. Just going to have to stagger the cooldowns now.

We also nerfed Arms and Fury damage across the board because they were doing too much damage in both PvP and PvE. While we are sensitive to casters outperforming melee on several raid encounters, having warriors handily outperform all other melee isn’t the solution to that problem.

Saw it coming *shrug*.

We didn’t want warriors using Charge as a rotational ability on some fights without actually having to move (which was a bug created as a result of a fix put in to help hunter problems with minimum range).

Oh so you actually did make Hunter deadzone less punishing on encounters...

Just...remove...the...damn...deadzone...

It'll make life easier for all of us. Please...

As discussed previously, now that players who have spent a lot of time in Throne of the Four Winds, Blackwing Descent, and Bastion of Twilight are moving on to Firelands, we wanted to make sure players who previously couldn’t progress on those raids are now able to experience them. In a way, this provides new content for everyone -- if you’re done with the 4.0 raids, you now have 4.2. If you haven’t seen the 4.0 raids yet, now’s your chance.

But the fact we'll be able to access tier 11 gear should be sufficient. Doing a double whammy nerf...not a good idea >_<.